Work Text:
I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.
"DETAIL OF THE WOODS," RICHARD SIKEN
⊡
Search keywords: "Itoshi Industries"
SEARCHING…
RETRIEVING ARCHIVED FILES…
LOADING BEST MATCHES…
RELEVANT RESULTS
REPORT, MISSION FILE 610718 | Decryption Needed To Access File
Retrieved from: ITOSHI INDUSTRIES, BASTARD MÜNCHEN
Blue Lock Alumni Join Hands To Launch a New Series of Metavision® Offerings
[2060] … Yoichi and Itoshi Rin launch a new sector under Itoshi Industries…
Itoshi zaibatsu under fire from viral campaign against artificial life
[2059] … alleges that Itoshi Rin, younger brother to current CEO Itoshi Sae…
Itoshi Industries announces new CEO in a landmark investment
[2058]… Itoshi Sae, 18, pictured with Itoshi Rin… new director of Itoshi Industries…
REGISTRATION, ANDROID 071107 | Decryption Needed To Access File
Retrieved from: ITOSHI INDUSTRIES
PM Buratsuta Hirotoshi and Ego Jinpachi launch two Plans of Actions
[2055] … scion to Itoshi Industries among those reportedly scouted…
BACKUP CODE 011100100110100101101110 | Unable to Access File
Retrieved from: ITOSHI INDUSTRIES ***
Unidentified boy, 9, found dead in gruesome Shibuya district scene
[2052] … comment on speculation that the victim is Itoshi Rin, younger son of the…
NETDANCER LICENSE APPLICANTS | Decryption Needed To Access File
Retrieved from: MINISTRY OF HEALTH, LABOUR AND WELFARE
New Prime Minister elect Buratsuta Hirotoshi discusses national plans for tenure
[2050] … strengthening ties with Jinpachi Ego, the Itoshi Industries zaibatsu …
DECRYPTING REPORT, MISSION FILE 610718 ...
CHECKING AUTHORIZATION…
██████████████████████████████████████ Shidou Ryusei ██ lost █ Fann Mountains ██████████ retrieval mission tasked to ████ Itoshi Rin █ Isagi Yoichi and Bachira Meguru ██ Blue Lock alumni ████ results in █████████ posed as members of Itoshi Industries crew ████ two deaths ████ involvement of Bastard München ██ Mikage Health █████ uncovers European crime ring ████████████████████ compromises safety of only known Lethe trial subject Bachira Meguru ████████████████████ Shidou Ryusei █████ used as █████████████████████ further investigation ████████ witness protection ████████ information leak within the organization ████████████████████ ██████████
⊡
Year 2061, Month 09, Day 05
Location: 27.0976° N, 142.2028° E
Time: 18:03
It’s rare that late summer evenings feel like this.
Like pressing a kiss to a corpse’s mouth: the sky dangling a sunset over the city as though it would rather do anything but. Shifting hues cooler than they should be, all the more lifeless at that fleeting moment of touch over the horizon.
No rain today, but it’s the kind of absence that lingers in all the wrong ways until it’s noticed. Even the clouds seem suffocated by their own standstill as Sae leaves it behind it in favor of the stale air of the dock warehouse, his group falling back at the mouth of one of the exits without having to be told.
Hundreds of trailers and storage containers leave no room except to follow the warehouse’s narrow pathways, hardly labyrinthine enough to be a maze but designed to be difficult for a first-time guest in broad daylight and impossible in the dark. If Sae was more prone to poeticisms, he might call the warehouse a playground built from discarded junk to contain an especially restless beast—but he knows what this particular beast needs to be contained, and in the silence underneath the echo of his own footsteps, a silence so absolute it seems as if the last of the noise has been physically strangled out of its throat, he hears instead what he already knows to be fact: that when it comes to Shidou Ryusei, nothing is only ever metaphor.
He’s lighting a hand-rolled cigarette when Sae reaches him, long limbs loose even as he reclines far enough in his seat to bring two of the chair’s legs a foot off the ground. It’s a miracle that Shidou’s even wearing his suit jacket; its sleeves have been pushed along with the shirt underneath all the way to his elbows, as messy as a collar that’s been, as always, unbuttoned to bare the slim choker around his neck and the three lines of fine lettering embossed onto his left chest.
Not many androids, even the most obedient ones, like to parade around proof that they’re someone’s property, bound to a master’s beck-and-call at the cost of their existence. Shidou is neither perfectly obedient nor like many androids at all, in everything from his function to his disposition—yet he’s special more than anything in how he displays Sae’s brand on him as if it’s been put there for him to show off.
He lights up the moment he senses company.
"You’re late, Sae-chan!" He whistles around a puff of smoke, waving with the hand holding his cigarette without waiting for Sae to step into the light. "I was gettin’ so bored without you."
Sae stops before his shoes can hit a lump of wet fabric: curled into itself on the ground, its quivering uncontrollable.
"It’s none of my concern if you can’t keep yourself entertained without me." He taps one foot. "Didn’t I say to keep him alive?"
"I did," says Shidou, and has the gall to sound like a kicked puppy for being told off. He frowns, contemplative. "To both counts! Kept myself entertained without you and kept him alive."
By Sae’s feet, the youngest member of the House of Councillors has seen better days: past a map of bruises curving across the entire right side of his face, a burst cut splits both his lips in an uneven line, his hair lying matted wet against where blood has dried around his forehead—but the fact that he remains recognizable at all means Shidou must have had his fair share of fun letting his prisoner run free around the docks. Brandishing freedom carelessly in front of a rabbit who doesn’t know it’s only being released to be hunted for its predator’s momentary enjoyment.
Sae remains perfectly impassive as Shidou’s chair slams flat on the ground, half his weight moving forward to grab a fistful of the Councillor’s hair.
He clicks his teeth at the dead weight he finds in his grip.
"Ah, that won’t do. Wakey, wakey, Councillor. C’mon. I even let you take a nap." He perks up, like a dog at attention, when he gets a garbled moan, tightening his hold on the man’s hair to tilt his face up until he’s facing Sae. "That’s a good boy. See, Sae-chan?"
Another faint moan. A few fleeting moments of hardly open eyes. Sae’s own empty themselves completely to meet what’s left to see there. He expects to find some sort of plea, or at least a clear desire to give in, but if there’s any of that, Shidou must have already squeezed out all the pretenses that give the man’s self-preservation its shape. If Sae has learned one certain thing from the footage and data he’s collected on all the councillors, this particular one has always been the kind of stupid seen only in people who see an overnight change in net worth, and therefore the kind of simple that someone is only fine being when they believe there’s a place for their taking among the penthouses of the Inner City. A middling start-up upstart told at a young age that he was brilliant when in fact he’s mediocre in the wider schema the world operates on, and all that this amount of praise has instilled in him is a lack of desire for more than a lackluster life with lackluster achievements that to him are good enough to cement as goals.
That one entrepreneur pivoted to politics and thought he could stand toe to toe with Itoshi Industries is a laughable conclusion at best, yet an inevitability so uninventive that Sae can’t even muster enough disgust as he motions for Shidou to release the Councillor.
The body flops heavily back into a puddle of water, hard enough to splash Sae’s pants.
"Whoops," says Shidou.
Sae stares at him, unimpressed. "So?"
"So." Shidou rummages through the Councillor’s back pockets with his free hand. He beams, his smile a fleeting flash of sharp teeth, when he finds what looks to be a single piece of foil-wrapped candy. "The guy’s a total waste of the world’s oxygen. Bo-ring. Got nothing we didn’t already know."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning as far as he knows, whoever was poking around to intercept my mission to the Fann Mountains last month was with the same overseas group who kidnapped our Rin-rin’s Netdancer friend."
"As far as this guy knows?"
"Yeah." Shidou moves to straighten—then changes his mind, squatting back next to the Councillor to flick cigarette ash off over his back. "As far as this guy knows."
The candy, he offers upwards.
Sae takes it. He doesn’t unwrap the foil. "You don’t buy it."
Shidou shrugs. "Gut feeling."
"Not good enough," says Sae. "You can do better."
Shidou pulls another drag from his cigarette. He might not be aware of it himself, too content spinning in the cataclysmic hurricane he makes out of his own existence, but he’s at his most eerie in silence: how his entire being falls into a hush when he allows himself to think, to dig all the way inside himself and fish out what to him has been truth for so long that it’s second nature, intuition, gut feeling. The irony is in how some truths are biological for Shidou, and some parts of that synthetic biology as essential as the existential, and when he thinks this quietly, he embodies silence and stillness with the same abandon he does everything else he wears.
It’s only through years of practice that Sae no longer reacts as he waits.
Shidou lowers his cigarette, arms hanging over his knees in a relaxed squat.
"Someone knew I was gonna be at the Fann Mountains and was ready to set things up so that Underlashes Jr.’s gonna have to come get me with Isagi goddamn Yoichi and their Netdancer friend. ‘Lo and behold, Netdancer-kun’s actually a precious as hell test subject that one of those European powers could make big bucks auctioning off to potential buyers. Rin-rin and Isagi Yoichi get to work, boom, bam, the org’s dissolved overnight, happy ending for all. But it’s a little too happy, don’t ya think? No, it’s a little too much of an ending. I’m not exactly an easy android to catch and keep down. But they did it. I wouldn’t believe it if it didn’t happen to me. And sure, they let me go, but it doesn’t sit right with me that they can just do that any time."
"Are you sure," says Sae, "that you’re not just saying all this because you’re upset some nobodies outsmarted you?"
"Oh sure, I’m upset." Shidou grins, the corners of his eyes sharpening at the pull of his mouth. "I’m so angry I could line ‘em all up and crack their skulls one by one with a single hand."
Sae can never say for certain if this particular metallic glint in Shidou’s eyes is native to his gaze or if it’s one it saves especially for Sae’s benefit—but it’s a rope too dangerous to crosswalk, deciding where to put the lines of separation between Shidou’s reason for being and the parts of him that are all for Sae’s claiming.
"But?"
"But." Shidou takes one last violent pull from his cigarette before killing it against one of the Councillor’s sleeves. "No way some backwater engineers outsmarted me. That’d mean they outsmarted you, and you’re too you to let that happen, Sae-chan."
Feigning boredom, Sae turns the candy over his palm. It’s remarkably unscathed, the flavor label intact despite the loose twist of the wrapping.
"Stop talking in circles around me. What are you saying?"
Shidou straightens to his full height, cracking his neck to one side, then the other. "I’m saying that either there’s something you’re not telling me, or you had me do all this ‘cause you wanted to test if I’m the traitor you’re looking for." A shrug. "Or both. Could be both."
"Or both," Sae echoes. He looks back at Shidou. Satisfied despite himself. "That’s a shame. You missed one."
He can feel the curiosity that seizes Shidou then, feel it more than he hears it, sifting through the air like the lingering fumes of freshly soldered iron.
"I did?" says Shidou.
"One glaring possibility." Sae prods the Councillor’s immobile form with one foot. There’s movement this time, a slight stir. "Don’t disappoint me now, demon."
This, too, only he knows about Shidou: that it isn’t violence itself that frees his adrenaline, isn’t the physical act of dominance over another unpredictable being that zings through his bloodstream once he tastes it. That it is, more than anything, the unpredictability itself that gets Shidou going—the concept of a challenge, a shove where hardly anything ever reaches far enough to push him. Shidou lives off inevitabilities: life, death, blood where a wound is dealt, sex as pleasure, pain as so much the opposite it’s a kind of pleasure in itself. So when something scratches instead of impales, laughs instead of cries, dangles instead of feeds, there’s this: pure delight, like a child realizing that away from the clutches of reality there are no limits to what one can dream.
"Ah!" says Shidou, voice pitching to almost singsong. "I guess you can’t ignore the chance that Sae-chan was the one who leaked info on me, huh. That’d make a lot of sense. You’d know better than anyone what your lil’ bro would do, and what would get me to behave."
He says it like it’s a favor he’s used to allowing, and Sae indulges it only because he’s half-right, Shidou’s submission as much a currency to them both as his violence is a weapon for Sae.
"And?"
"And nothing." Shidou shrugs. "It wasn’t you."
"No. It wasn’t me," Sae agrees, no hesitation, no inflection; underneath everything, the one immovable core between him and Shidou might be that no bullshit is tolerated from either side. His mouth almost, almost twitches at the thought, but loosens itself at the last second. "And here I was expecting a tantrum at the possibility that I could have sold you off."
"You wound me, Sae-chan. How does my contract go again? I answer to anything my Host asks of me?" Shidou’s smile, almost sweet, lingers longer this time, squeezing his own words dry for the simple amusement of bastardizing legal binding. "And I do, don’t I? I answer to you and only you. You’re not gonna make me compromise that."
Sae could have scoffed. Instead, he meets the self-satisfaction on Shidou’s face with a weighted stare. "Loyal as always, aren’t we."
"Like only the best dogs are."
"Do you expect a treat as a reward?"
"Why, do I get one—"
Shidou’s voice plunges into nothing.
Then movement, and only Sae’s vague awareness of what precedes it: the Councillor’s hand, reaching for the nearest thing—probably without even knowing who and where he is—his fingers skimming the damp edge of Sae’s pants in an attempt to ground himself—
—a blink—
—then warm wetness on Sae’s cheeks—the front of his shirt stained by heat before the splatter bleeds through the white completely—and an overpowering, inhuman droning in his ears as he registers, without blinking again, the gold glint of one of Shidou’s Desert Eagles disappearing back into the shoulder holster hidden in his suit jacket.
When he realizes, Shidou’s mouth falls open in a cartoonishly perfect o.
His hands, rising in the air as if in civilian surrender, are empty again. Palms steady, unbothered by the violent recoil of a gun only someone like him can brandish and tuck away like a house key card.
"Shit," says Shidou, his voice coming fuzzy and distant to the bang still reverberating inside Sae’s ears. "Oops. Did you still need him?"
Sae looks down, properly now, at the blood pooling around his shoes.
Low under the buzz of other thoughts, he thinks, almost dizzily, that there had been no smell of gunpowder in the air at all when he arrived. Not even a hint.
All of the Councillor’s visible wounds and bruises had suggested Shidou’s fists and feet.
No knives, either. Shidou doesn’t like them. Finds them cowardly. Finds them too finicky, he says, for something so high-maintenance. Only for the truly insignificant. The dirty. The used. The equally cowardly.
But guns, he has always prioritized for those who touch Sae without permission.
Tracking the small pieces of flesh around his feet with his gaze, seeing how cleanly and unhesitantly Shidou’s shot had gone through the Councillor’s head without even the slightest danger of going off-course to the last target he’ll ever want to hurt, Sae can’t help the tiny, tiny smile that grazes his mouth as a thrill slits alive and electric down his spine.
"No," he says, convincingly monotone. "I never needed him."
"Just a pawn in your little test, right," says Shidou, his voice suddenly close—and then he’s there, heat and the undeniable lingering of gunpowder and cigarette smoke, his own exception as he tilts Sae’s face up with a finger, the one motion almost gentle with purpose, to wipe the unwelcome warmth off his cheek with a thumb. "Works out fine for us all, then, no?"
Around their feet, the blood continues to flood, gathering into a puddle that nearly, if Sae dares look directly, seems to reflect their silhouettes.
Seeing Shidou consider the uneven smear of blood on his hand, Sae manages to say, "Try not to be a cliché and lick that off, too."
Shidou’s eyes flick towards him, bright again. Alert at the barest hint of possibility. "Can I have a taste of something else, then?"
Sae keeps his gaze steady, tilting his head only a fraction to meet Shidou’s gaze head on. "With a line like that, I don’t think so."
Yet it’s muscle memory, how Shidou’s hands slip around Sae’s waist—as muscle memory as the thrum still in his body, vibrating from the whiplash of his gun and the high of whatever he had done with the Councillor while Sae allowed him off his leash. Muscle memory embedded in the two of them, how Sae’s body can’t seem to remember how to resist well enough for it to matter, to angle himself so he can deny instead of lean without thinking into the only hands, splaying flat on either side of him, that can grip and hold him without caging.
Shidou hums, his voice right by Sae’s ear, his hands dragging down until his fingertips can slip through Sae’s back belt loops.
"But Sae-chan likes it, doesn’t he? When I kill for him?"
Sae’s mouth parts. It’s a second too long, before he finds the words.
"It’s what you were made to do."
"Please you?" Shidou laughs, a sound that hums through them both. His mouth almost brushes against Sae’s ear, as easily imagined as the effort it takes for Sae not to shiver. "I don’t know about that, but it is the thing I enjoy the most these days."
It’s a mutualism no one else might understand, how power and danger and safety from both of these, protection only the other can provide, circles between them without ever picking one to be stationary within. Not an exchange, not an agreement, not even a transaction, but its own creature in constant motion and flux, all in the heat of Shidou’s palms over the thin layer of Sae’s dress shirt.
"You gonna tell me whatever it is you’ve been keeping to yourself, hm? About who’s behind all this?"
"Where’s the fun in handing things to you?" Sae’s next exhale leaves him in a huff. "Figure it out yourself. That’s the kind of shit you love, isn’t it?"
"Ha—My owner sure knows me well."
Then Shidou’s letting Sae go, retreating without sticking, never one to take what’s yet to be offered because to do so would be to squeeze all the sweetness out of fruit yet to ripen.
Turning away, Sae jerks his chin to the scene around them. The air feels damp and suffocating now, thick and tainted by the truth of what it’s seeing the moment Shidou had stepped away.
"I have another security breach to attend to. Clean up your mess. I don’t want extra shit to sign."
Shidou’s sigh is exaggerated and aggrieved, the first sign all week that all these little jobs with no explanation that Sae has saddled him with since he returned has been about as interesting to him as the paperwork that follows.
"Do I have to? Get Four-Eyes to do it. Or Captain—"
He pauses, like a forest animal catching noise, at the sound of the candy wrapper.
Crinkling open easily under Sae’s gloves, unresisting as he flicks his eyes over to meet Shidou’s.
Slowly, he presses the tiny piece of caramel against his own tongue. Letting it stick without closing his mouth just yet, and letting Shidou’s gaze stick, too, on the curve of his mouth, the pink of his tongue, before he drags his own eyes below Shidou’s waistline.
This time, Sae pronounces each word carefully, the candy too sweet around the firm balance of his voice.
"Clean. Up. Your. Mess."
⊡
Year 2061, Month 09, Day 05
Location: 35.660814°N 139.737560°E
Time: 18:35
If Bachira Meguru sees anything wrong with being trapped in a closed space with Sae, it doesn’t show on any part of his body.
He’s wearing a button-down that doesn’t belong to him, the too-long sleeves hanging past his palms even as he traces the overhead buttons on his end of the stretch sedan. There’s no telling if he has no concept of danger at all, if he’s simply confident he’ll manage fine with whatever he’s subjected to, or if, in fact, he’s oblivious to the reality of why he’s here. Since Aiku deposited him into the car, all Bachira has thought to say is: Um, is it okay if I sit on that side? I usually get carsick if I sit with my back to the direction we’re going, and I don’t wanna throw up on such a nice—Oh. That’s okay.
The likelihood of carsickness being true is low considering Bachira’s background, yet the likelihood of someone as straightforward as him having a tendency to lie is just as unreliable. Watching him squint out the car’s tinted windows as if it’s his first time seeing the city blur past in a sludge of insignificant lights, Sae’s beginning to suspect this won’t be the last of the contradictions he should expect from Bachira—and beginning to suspect, too, that if there’s any facade to be wary of at all, it might be in the misleading notion that Bachira Meguru is as readable as they come.
If Aiku had stuck around, he might say that Sae’s default suspicion is its own kind of bias; that might be right, even if Sae will never admit it, but suspicion has never hurt him more than it helped. And with people like Bachira Meguru, who smiles at Sae now, wide and waiting as if he hadn’t just been caught rooting around Sae’s office at the Itoshi Industries’ building like it was just another room in an abandoned vacation home, one can never be sure about how impossibilities and paradoxes can also be undoubtedly true.
"Um. So. Rin-chan’s nii-chan." Bachira waves at the space between them, one oversized sleeve flopping in the air. "Are you usually this careful around everyone or do Netdancers get special treatment?"
Sae doesn’t twitch, but it’s a near thing. "Mouthing off at me? Aren’t you shameless."
Bachira grimaces. It doesn’t reach his face in any convincing way. "I didn’t mean to—It was a genuine question, I swear. But—Fair. I did break into your office."
"You admit it."
Bachira shrugs. "I was caught naked-handed." He frowns. "Is that how that saying goes? I just figured it’d be easier this way. I had a job last week and I’m still way pooped—Oh, but actually, while we’re talking about Netdancing—Have I ever gotten to thank you in person for this?"
Without waiting for an answer, he twists in his seat to offer his back to Sae, one thumb jerking to point as his button-down slips over the white t-shirt he has underneath. He’s quick to adjust it, still with that cloyingly happy-go-lucky expression, but Sae does see outlines of the silver ridges dotting the center of his back, a full spine implant that connects Bachira to any interface he can upload himself to without losing his hold on his own mind.
"I know I wasn’t supposed to know who made my implant, but now that I’m looking you in the face and remembering that I found out by accident once, I can’t really pretend as if I don’t know—you know what I mean? So—Thank you. My implant and I get along super well. There’s nothing about it I would change."
Sae can’t help scoffing.
Bachira just laughs.
Sae once heard one of his doctors say, years ago, that the only Netdancers who survive for long are those with nothing for the connection process to break. Netdancing is a matter of mental grace, of knowing how and what to compartmentalize when plugging your brain directly into an infinite database growing even more infinite by the second. It’s not necessarily fortitude or resilience, just the right kind of wrong; it has to be, to last in something no one can do forever. Longevity in Netdancing is either for people who are truly, truly empty, mere vessels to a job dealing with what might as well be singularity itself constrained into a handful of moments—or for people who were never quite right in the first place, their minds already just the slightest bit askew even before anything in the field could reach it and do it for them.
Studying how Bachira resettles in his seat, his body language loosening up even more as if he’s a friend visiting a home for the first time and not a wrongdoer cheerfully caught in the wrongdoing, it doesn’t take much to guess which category of successful Netdancers he belongs to.
"Do you ever miss it?" says Bachira, deceptively casual. "Netdancing?"
It’s like the pointed clink of an ice cube dropping into an empty glass, the sudden, immediate coldness that hits the bottom of Sae’s chest.
"Do all Netdancers," he says, "make a habit of knowing things they have no business poking their nose into, or are you just a special case?"
Bachira whistles. Even his awe sounds sincere, but it hardly matters when his sincerity resembles a child’s: knowing too little of the world, and somehow all the more honest about things that are no longer true for the grown-ups around him.
"Whoa, you glare exactly like Rin-chan! Or I guess he glares like you? He was the one who told me about you being a Netdancer before, though, so I promise I wasn’t digging around any of your private stuff about that."
Sae doesn’t blink. "My office doesn’t count as private stuff?"
"Well—Okay." Bachira absently scratches his wrist. "Um. I really didn’t mean to plug in at your office. I snuck into the building past your secretary after checking your schedule ‘cause I wanted to talk to you, but you weren’t in your office even though you didn’t have any meetings, and I figured I’d just wait—but then I kept waiting, and waiting—and I had something to plug into right there—"
"Plugging in is an interesting euphemism for unsanctioned hacking," says Sae. "And one that should be separate from your compulsive need to Netdance."
Bachira giggles like Sae means this as a joke. He doesn’t.
"I mean, technically, all my jobs are unsanctioned hacking. At least I felt guilty after this one and figured I might as well get caught so we can chat."
Sae allows himself a deep exhale. "Your excuses are tiring."
"Oh, no, I could have gotten away from your head of security! Without a doubt."
Bachira means it. To a point that he’ll dare Sae to see it in action, to call Aiku back into this conversation and watch with his own eyes to see what Bachira will do. It’s the kind of audacity only over-inflated egos like that young Councillor’s would be capable of having like this—or really just someone like Bachira Meguru, who despite a distracting flightiness that’s either innate to his personality or a remnant symptom of the memory deletion trials he participated in last year, is still without question the best Netdancer currently active in the business.
Knowing that doesn’t mean Sae has to be happy or generous about it.
"Am I supposed to thank you for letting yourself stay caught?"
"Thank me? Nah." Bachira shakes his head, turning sheepish in a single blink. "You’re the one doing me a favor by letting me have this conversation."
"Right," says Sae, unamused. "This conversation. That you’ve been pushing around towards nowhere since we started."
Bachira glances around the car, before lowering his voice to say, "I’ve just been waiting for you to do something about the bug in the car with us."
"The one right above you?" Sae looks out the window, his patience and interest, never separate enough, already long thinned. "For my bodyguard to watch you?"
"Oh." In the corner of his eye, Sae sees Bachira glance upwards, studying the buttons he’d been dragging his fingertip around only minutes ago. "There’s a camera, too? Crap. I couldn’t tell."
Sae fights the sudden overwhelming need to sigh. There’s been a would-be headache lingering in the back of his head since the warehouse, and he knows it’s only a matter of time, less than an hour, before it will find its way to his temples, his eyes, the base of his skull. Its pounding as violent as a rain of fists, over as soon as it begins but no less intense because of it.
Do you ever miss it? Netdancing?
"Wait, by bodyguard do you mean Shidou Ryusei? I’ve been meaning to say hi since I heard we didn’t get off on the right—"
"Just get to the point," Sae bites out. "Or give me one good reason not to feed you to the dogs. Or don’t. I don’t care anymore."
"Metaphorical dogs or literal dogs—?" Bachira breaks off, seeing Sae’s expression. He raises both hands in the air, apologetic in a way that he seems used to being. "Yessir. Sorry. I just wanted to know if the rumors are true that you’re arranging a marriage for Rin-chan."
Sae stares at him.
Bachira stares back.
"What the hell," says Sae, "are you yapping about?"
"Oh." Bachira blinks. "So it’s not true? I had—A month ago, I had this job from—Well, confidential info. But that led me to another job, and basically, there’s some talk around the Desperate Housewives of the Tokyo Inner City that you Itoshis might be looking for—uh—marriage. Loveless or not. Or—Business-related or not, I mean."
He pluralizes Itoshi with the English s, dragging it into a z sound meant to tease.
Sae has to curl one hand into a fist so he doesn’t try to physically wave that off. "This is what you wasted my time for?"
"I didn’t mean to waste your time—"
"And yet you did."
"—but neither Rin-chan nor Yocchan were bringing it up, and I wanted to fact-check before I did—"
"So you snuck into my office."
"To ask about a teeny-tiny question."
"About whether I’m looking to get married."
Bachira winces at the venom. "Rin-chan. I’m really just concerned about Rin-chan."
"Does Rin seem to you like he’s in any position to have a partner that won’t threaten divorce in three days?"
Bachira’s mouth parts.
He tilts his head.
His eyes flick away.
Then, gaze sliding, almost shy, back to Sae: "I’d say he’s making two of us pretty happy, actually."
Sae had started to unlatch a small compartment on his side of the car, and his hand stops over the clasp at this, hovering for a long moment—before he decides to fix his deadest stare on Bachira Meguru without distraction.
"You have to be kidding me," he says. "Wasting my time and trying to pick around my office over this?"
Bachira flinches. "Sorry."
"Even if I had any plans as banal and unnecessary as arranged marriage for Rin," says Sae, spitting only the two words out to get another flinch, "if he has his hands full with two of you, I won’t hear the end of it until I drop it. I don’t concern myself with business like that, and neither should you if there’s anything left in your brain that Netdancing hasn’t fried up."
He motions, and the car immediately begins to slow in the middle of a tunnel, the emergency lights rendering Bachira’s face half in shadow as he stares at Sae.
"Was that—Are you trying to reassure me?"
The car stops.
"Get out of my car," says Sae. "Before Rin and Isagi Yoichi send god knows what after me over something so inane."
"I—"
"Out."
Bachira scoots closer to the door.
He doesn’t open it.
"Rin-chan doesn’t know, does he? About who had him killed?"
It’s an unexpected kind of eerie, too, not unlike Shidou’s quiet, to hear Bachira’s voice adopt an abrupt hush, stripped of volume and tone so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that it’s as if he has swallowed the shadows around them.
But Sae has had enough of people making him repeat himself today.
This time, Bachira takes the dismissal.
⊡
Year 2061, Month 09, Day 05
Location: 35.7294° N, 139.7182° E
Time: 22:56
There was a time, when Sae was still the size of a child, that nights had been quiet.
Quiet if not peaceful, quiet if not still, as if the air that hung over an empty cemetery had been plucked out by a disembodied hand and plopped over the city instead. There had been less borders and boundaries then, less names to remember. Or maybe they had existed and they just hadn’t mattered to Sae yet.
A lot of things, really, hadn’t mattered before Madrid.
A lot of things, probably, will stop mattering if Madrid also does.
But across the life that it splits into two, Sae has changed from a child-sized entity with an infinite amount of things to remember and become a dead-end creature with an infinite amount of things to tell himself he doesn’t remember. Not remembering is not the same as forgetting, he thinks, in the way that nothing is still something and absence is also a presence. To forget is to have a memory vacate a space, yet for the space to remain, aware that an occupant has been uprooted before it could grow—but to not remember is to deny something a space altogether, and Sae has always been better at denying others access to him than he is any good at denying truth to himself.
Things aren’t quite as cleanly separated, division or categorization, when it comes to Shidou Ryusei.
Sae must be honing a natural radar of his own; not a single part of him stirs in surprise at the sound of the elevator sliding apart, its hushed beep softer than the vague punches of pain in his head as languid footsteps click over marble flooring. He wonders, briefly, unwantedly, if a part of him had even hoped Shidou would come as soon as he was back—that he would hear Sae’s silence and read it in something that will never be articulated and afford it the attention that Sae will never give it.
His temples pulse in complaint at the mere idea.
Shidou lives, technically, in a unit just below Sae’s penthouse, mirroring the layout from the entryway down to the grand piano in a corner surrounded by south-facing windows. Somewhere it will be easy for him to use the single elevator system that goes straight to the top floors and resort to as few stairs as possible in cases of emergency. Somewhere he can track the footsteps that come and go in the floor above, somewhere it won’t take him any time at all to come if Sae beckons.
Sae rarely beckons.
Sae rarely has to beckon.
Shidou has an uncanny way of knowing when he can slip in, breezing through locks that are always useless around him, hair and eyes and mouth a sudden bright spot in Sae’s vision as Shidou peeks over the couch to find Sae sprawled across its length and holding a drained whiskey glass to his forehead.
A beat of silence.
"How long—" they say at the same time.
Shidou grins. Sae’s face twists into a half-scowl.
"Been back for no more than ten," says Shidou, draping himself over the back of the couch to look even closer at Sae. Always looking closer, always needing more to drink in. He’s changed into the long-sleeved undershirt he wears when he trains; the smooth metal of his black choker rises far above its collar just the same. "I was hurt you left without me, Sae-chan! But I get it now. That’s the third one this year, ain’t it? Should—"
"It hasn’t been that long," Sae mutters, a grudging answer to Shidou’s unfinished question. "None of them have gone on for that long. It will pass. Don’t be dramatic."
"Did you take—"
"Obviously."
"Did you eat?"
Sae pauses.
"I don’t want to eat."
Shidou stills in the middle of pulling away from the couch.
"I’m not in the mood to eat," Sae rephrases, "right now."
Shidou plucks the glass out of Sae’s hand with a low whistle, his gaze scratching over him before he vanishes from behind the couch. "Running the bath for you, then."
"Hey—" Sae sits up, scowling after him—but Shidou has already disappeared into the bedroom, only a sliver of light visible through the open door as the sound of running water begins to hum through the apartment from the en-suite bathroom.
Louder, and more irritable for it, Sae repeats, "Hey."
Shidou returns to the room with a smile—not a grin but a smile, something satisfied about the expectation he fixes on Sae. As if he’s already won with the fact that Sae is sitting up at all, and all that’s left to do is lick remnant cream off the plate as he says, "You go yourself or I bring you over, Sae-chan. You pick."
"Aren’t you too happy ordering me around?"
That only makes Shidou beam, the expression soft on him. He performs a caricature of a curtsy as Sae drags his feet past him, already starting to pull off layers of clothing and leaving them in his wake like crumbs for prey to be baited by.
Gloves. Jacket. Dress shirt. Tie. Goosebumps already standing in attention over Sae’s skin as it prepares itself to be bared, the cold air of the penthouse always inhospitable to the way his entire body cools to chilly during one of these headaches.
Then the predator in a white room, alone at first, waiting for the tickling probe of attention on his back, teasing the heat of the steaming water with one foot.
The tub is square and built for more than one, made exactly to be just a touch too porcelain, a touch too pristine not to tarnish.
When Shidou lingers in the doorway, leaning and watching and taking not a single step further, Sae rewards him with eye contact as he slips, undressed and as without armor as he allows, into the tub.
The faucet turns off automatically once the water kisses the right level.
In the silence, Sae murmurs, "Come here. Wash me."
Shidou, despite his rougher instincts, has always been a quick study in the game they play. He had been created for the military’s use, more mercenary than bodyguard, and when he proved beyond even their control—too violent, too unresponsive to rules and systems, too unpredictable, maybe even too human in all of that—they had written him up for disposal, just a scrap of sentient metal sent to the junkyard. Then the evening of Sae’s eighteenth birthday came and went, Prime Minister Buratsuta laughing and leering and offering to gift him anything he wanted "in honor of Itoshi Industries’ role in the future of our nation"—and there had been nothing else Sae thought to want but exclusive rights to the android he had seen footage of only once, only by accident, in a folder that wasn’t his to peruse.
That Shidou had taken no time at all to adjust to being Sae’s was a surprise that came foreign and novel to even his new owner. Sae knows there are members of his guard and board that believe he was lured in by the temptation of taming a wild animal, that the appeal for him in obtaining Shidou was to own something that no one else could—but to assume Sae will ever want to own Shidou completely is to misunderstand what makes Shidou Ryusei who and what he is in the first place.
The point isn’t to tame him, or leash him under absolute control. That, Sae has never wanted for. He’s precise and absolute enough in all parts of life, untouchable to everything, even himself and what remains of his relationship with his brother. He’s not interested in adding another artifact to a collection that only others dare see as precious. There’s no satisfaction, at the end of the day, in looking at his little museum of untouchable things.
The image of fullness, even if not in itself an illusion, doesn’t fill. That has been the only constant truth of Sae’s life.
What he wants, and what he has gotten in Shidou, is for someone to come into the room, look at all these fragile, valuable objects, and approach each one without giving away if he means to steal it or shatter it or leave it alone. What Sae wants is something more alive and unpredictable than any of these inanimate things he keeps in one room, something more thrilling than a conclusion that was bygone before Sae even reached the point of no return.
The catch that no one but Sae will notice is that Shidou Ryusei was chosen for his natural propensity towards resistance and encouraged by Sae’s authority to defy and disobey. Allowed free reign to push and challenge and question at every turn in ways he never would have been allowed to under the government’s jurisdiction. Acquired to not be just another exhibit in a museum celebrating dead things. Molded to be a living antithesis to the sins Sae committed when he lost his brother and invented a new one in his place thinking there is nothing in this life or the next, not even grief or divine creation, that can stop him from inventing his way into that place that still, no matter what, cannot be filled.
Shidou was designed to fulfill nothing but his own reason for being, one that neither Sae nor the military decided for him, and it’s the only unpredictability left in Sae’s life, to know that the only directive Shidou will follow without fail is to protect him. Everything else is his, and therefore not Sae’s, and in ways Sae refuses to understand and accept, there is an irreplaceable kind of intoxication in knowing there’s something that Sae can have without truly, wholly owning.
The last time he asked Shidou to wash his back for him, they hadn’t made it to the tub at all, the glass doors of the shower in another corner of the bathroom instead fogging up with Sae’s soft exhales as he shoved into the perfect heat of Shidou’s mouth.
Tonight, Shidou doesn’t enter the tub once again, only pulls up a cart and a stool with a hum, planting himself by the edge and turning Sae to the side, hands loose around his shoulders, so that they’re not looking at each other.
"What is this supposed to be?" says Sae.
"Washing your back, Sae-chan, what else?"
Sae can’t help a frown. He opens his mouth, but Shidou doesn’t give him a chance before pouring water over him, movements as deft with grabbing the right bottles from the cart as it had been with his Desert Eagle. The image is usually as close to funny as anything can be with Sae; this time, it’s disorienting.
"You gonna tell me what’s going on?"
Sae sighs. "I already told you to figure it out yourself."
"Not that," says Shidou, draping his arm over Sae’s shoulder to pull him closer. The product is cold on Sae’s hair; Shidou’s skin burns against his anyway. "What Bachira Meguru said in the car."
"You’d have to be more specific."
"Uh-uh." Shidou clicks his tongue against his teeth. As though he’s wagging a finger at a toddler, telling them what they can’t put in their mouth. "I don’t wanna play whatever game it is you’re trying to start tonight, Sae-chan. You’ll tell me the truth about Rin-rin when you’re ready."
Sae watches droplets of water slide across his forearm.
"No game," he mutters. "Just tell me what the hell is wrong with you. It’s so uninspired to make me read your mind."
"Oh, but you’re so good at it, Master."
"That’s not reason enough to be bound to doing it."
Shidou whistles. "Checkmate. And you just said we weren’t playing."
Sae turns to look at him in full. He might not seem all that threatening like this, wet hair and damp skin, but he finds better footing when the water scarcely splashes, moving around him in this large tub as if even here, bared and as vulnerable as a body can be, he remains untouchable.
Shidou’s eyes travel, instinctive and slow, down what they can drink in from Sae.
"Spit it out," says Sae. "I mean it."
Shidou’s hand rises to Sae’s face before his gaze follows, a perfect slip under Sae’s chin as Shidou tilts it just the slightest bit upwards, a hovering change that brings them close enough for the distance to feel confrontational when Shidou says, "Marriage, huh?"
Sae doesn’t blink. The surprise that winks in the back of his mind brings him close—but Shidou will have to try much harder to get him to look away.
"You gonna get yourself a pretty little wife to carry on the Itoshi name, hm?" says Shidou, leaning forward as if to confide a secret. "And what? Keep me at your feet? Be your plaything on the side when the business trips go on for too long and you need a throat to fuck?"
There’s genuine irritation there, palpable as Sae seizes Shidou by the wrist. Gripping the arm tight, weaponizing the steadiness of his own hold.
Oh, how childlike. How cliché. How utterly wrong to see on a creature meant to be obedient and unquestioning.
And equally childlike, too, equally cliché and wrong, the gratification that brings heat coursing through Sae’s chest at seeing it.
"Jealousy," he says, "is so unsightly to see on my favorite pet."
Shidou raises an eyebrow. "Thinking of buying others?"
Sae allows the tug in his own mouth, lets Shidou go with contained violence, as if he’s throwing away the arm he’s holding. His strength is no match, but the fact that he’s able to, that Shidou allows his arm to go slack enough to be slapped away—It’s intoxicating to lengths Sae will never want to pursue just to understand.
He’s so far, in the end, is the only thought that lingers. Shidou is right here yet remains so, so far. Right here, body heat and the same fingers that had pulled a gun earlier finding gentleness around Sae’s jaw, but it isn’t enough, won’t be enough, until Sae finds a way to tear out of his own skin and get rid of the phantom need inside him by giving it whatever the hell it wants from Shidou.
Sae wants—needs—to swallow him whole. Taste all of him in one go, a burst of flesh and blood that might satiate, at last, the hunger, the craving, electric and alive, that Sae felt the day he saw footage of Shidou during a base camp drill. He wants to contain Shidou into a single palm-sized ball and bite into it, to chew that until it’s sticky and impossible to swallow like gum—and yet, and yet, and yet Sae only wants this because he knows no invention will make it possible.
He’s done the impossible. He’s achieved it in his brother, has paid the price for it. Maybe that makes it so that the intoxicating thing about Shidou, then, is the high of wanting to consume a thing that remains impossible to see in full even for someone no longer bound to the same laws of creation that everything else is.
Some nights, it starts to feel like that also means it’s Sae who wants to be swallowed whole.
"I might," he says, a soft, imperceptible tremble in his voice that Shidou hears in an instant, "if the only one I have can’t even follow a simple order. I told you to come here."
Again, instead of listening, instead of getting into the fucking tub and silencing Sae’s mind, Shidou takes Sae by the wristbone, eyes already shuttering halfway as presses his mouth against the pulse underneath.
"Oh, but you wouldn’t like it if I followed orders so easily," he murmurs. "Would you, Sae-chan? Perfect, desirable thing like you—You can want anything and the world will deliver it to you on a silver platter."
He peppers kisses down the inside of Sae’s forearm as punctuation. Hardly skimming, a ridiculously far cry from teeth usually happier to bite and suck. Sae’s body can’t deny it, how it’s the touch expected yet denied that blooms goosebumps down his skin.
"Careful now," he says, quiet even in its warning. "Don’t hold yourself in too high esteem or I’ll get bored."
Shidou’s smile is its own glint of silver.
"You? Bored of me?" he says, lazily talking his way back up to Sae’s palm. "You don’t even know what I’ll do next, Sae-chan. And you like that, don’t you? I can taste it on you. You don’t need to leash a dog who will never hurt you, after all, hm? You can sit safe in a burning house knowing that dog will return to your side without you calling for it. There’s no other place for him but there. Even if it means burning with you."
Shidou pulls back, his teeth finally scratching, faint, and his eyes snap up to Sae, intent and intense as it always is, as he takes two of Sae’s fingers into his mouth.
Sae allows him a slow push in, dragging the pads of his fingers all the way to the cavern of Shidou’s throat, waiting for his eyelids to flutter, a groan beginning in the hum of his voice—before deftly pulling them back out.
"And yet you let them take you." Sae’s free hand doesn’t have much to cross before resting against the thin black band around Shidou’s neck. He swipes his thumb across it, waits for it to react to his thumbprint with a faint flicker. Reminding Shidou who he belongs to. "You let them leash you."
He can’t read what emotion bleeds into his own voice.
Shidou doesn’t wait for him to try harder.
"I did," he says. "It never should have happened."
"No," Sae murmurs. He pulls back his hand, only to grab Shidou by the jaw, squeezing hard enough that he feels the bone underneath resist against his fingers. "I won’t forgive a second time, demon. Do you understand?"
That he doesn’t say at all who needs forgiving—Shidou, the people who managed to take him and use him as bait, or Sae himself—doesn’t go unnoticed. That must mean, too, that Sae’s intentions are as clear as they’ve ever been, as bare to see, and he waits for Shidou to gloat, to reach for what’s been dangled and say, Oh, Sae-chan must have been so worried about me, to send Rin-rin & Friends after me and still be this angry over it so many weeks later.
And ah, Sae thinks. Is it anger that he has felt this entire time?
Is it anger, so tightly coiled inside, only visible to him now that he’s seeing Shidou read it on him? Only reading, not saying a single word even though it will take so little to loosen Sae’s hold on his face. Eyes dark and dilated, mirroring the licks of flame starting to blink into Sae’s notice inside his chest. Like a sleeping dragon stirred from slumber, its first motions lethargic and indulgent.
Sae removes his hand from Shidou’s face, eyes already finding where he knows an outline of his thumbs will be on the deep brown of Shidou’s skin. Always an irreplaceable reward in its own way, when he can leave imprints on what everyone else is so sure he has tamed.
Shidou’s never been much of an easy, willing prey; he can tell, unlike the Councillor, when he’s been given freedom only because the possibility of having a runaway makes the final moments sweeter for his predator.
He heeds the hint well this time.
⊡
There is, unforgettably, something Sae finds wrong about it all: pressed against the edge of his own tub, one hand trying to find purchase on porcelain and failing as Shidou’s mouth works him open. Forgetting the real sound of his own voice, his gasps deafening around him and the world narrowing to the arms Shidou has locked around his thighs.
He’s still wearing the clothes he arrived in. The dark fabric darkened even more, wet and clinging to his skin. He doesn’t seem to care, only ever seems to care about pulling out the sounds he wants from Sae, only wants him begging even when he knows Sae will never beg, will never pray, will never ask—but he comes close sometimes without knowing why or how, only that it’s Shidou who brings him close to it, his hair damp in Sae’s tight grip and his body steady, unresistant, taking everything as Sae grinds down to get Shidou’s tongue further inside him.
Shidou will tease two out of him tonight before he’s satisfied enough to let Sae out of the tub altogether. His own rituals, his own prayers, Sae both his object of worship and the subject of the defilement he gets off on participating in.
Sae might like him most like this: happy to stave off his own pleasure because pulling Sae apart is its own sweet release, messy-haired and hungry, only buoyed by the soft orders and praise he receives. But Sae knows that Shidou likes him like this: on his back, his only anchor to the world in Shidou, irreplaceable and frenetic and unmanageable as he is and somehow the most constant thing Sae has ever wanted in his life.
Sae always forgets to find out what the wrong thing is.
He knows that he always starts off sure there’s something wrong about all of this, that they’re stretching the bounds of even perversion here—
—but it always takes so little, too, to stop caring.
Neither of them notice it when the water goes cold.
⊡
Year 2061, Month 09, Day 06
Location: 35.7294° N, 139.7182° E
Time: 04:46
Sae makes Shidou tell him, every time, what he wants. It’s as ritualistic as only routines can be at this point, but it’s also the recentering Sae needs once Shidou’s restless desperation wins and Shidou’s all his to do what he wants.
What do you want, my little demon? he’ll say. Tell me.
And Shidou will. Even with Sae’s hand around his neck, pressing his thumb down on his throat—even while grinding down on Sae’s foot, all he’ll get for that night—even while rolling his hips up from underneath Sae, breathless and eager and eyes like eclipses as Sae meets him with a harsh slide down—Shidou will tell Sae everything he wants like it’s a litany he’s memorized a long time ago.
He never gets all of it. Not really. But a creature like Shidou Ryusei will never get all that he wants, and it’s the work of the lifetime he’s spent with Sae that he’s only ever known how to want what he wants from Sae and Sae alone.
What people don’t ever realize about Sae is that he’s never wanted a protector, let alone a savior or a sorcerer who will rid him of everything he’s carrying. To want implies awareness of lack, as if Sae had seen what others received and wanted that for himself, too. But if there’s ever been anything he’s sure of from the very first second he became conscious in this world, it’s that no one will ever protect or save someone like him. There will be no one to rely on, no one to give what he’ll only have to receive. Not ever. Sae was born with power as his birthright, but always, power will require a source. That, nothing will ever save him from. He was born to wield what he has, and nothing will ever change that until death, and he’s never wanted different.
Yet he gets a taste of a different kind of power altogether sometimes, with Shidou. In the certainty that he is not his protector or savior but an extension of Sae, all the pieces of him he’s locked away threaded together and given form in an entity more human than half the population that surrounds him.
Sae considers at times, sparingly, uncaringly, if an unconscious part of him had been drawn to this abandoned android because he was his opposite: instinct to his logic, intuition to his data, frantic carnal pleasure to his slow burn games. Or if, maybe, he had been drawn in because they remain fundamentally the same person inside, just parallels, two separate faces of the same coin.
But neither of them are half of anything.
Some nights, they complete each other just the same.
There’s no mistaking the high that comes from that for anything else. The sugary intoxication of knowing that the place someone belongs to is by your side. A knowing that goes beyond ownership, or companionship. It’s a link. A tie. A biological core recognizing another, such that Shidou Ryusei will set the world on fire sooner than be denied his spot next to Sae.
Tell me, Sae says, and Shidou does, always with a groaned fuck, Sae-chan, please, please, please that rattles down both their bones. Setting fire to flesh, desperation made sweet and denial sour.
Tell me, Sae says, and Shidou turns both their minds off with so little, until none of the words make sense between them, only the call-and-response of their bodies and how full, how unemptied, being like this makes Sae feel. Grasping the sheets, the headboard, window-glass, letting Shidou plug him full and turn him around to kiss him fleetingly but blissfully stupid.
So many words for it fall short. Trust is over-personal; vulnerability is disgustingly sentimental. Incomplete for this eternally looping circuitry of power and reckless alive-ness, sparking with each vulgar slap of skin on skin and how everything else shuts down until all Sae can think is: Beg me. Want me. Only me. I found you. I chose you. You will never be anyone else’s but mine. Remember that.
Each time, once Shidou pulls out for the last time after an eternity of repeats, mouthing his way down the side of Sae’s neck and groaning his thank you as Sae quivers in his lap—
Sae traces his own name embossed on Shidou’s chest and smiles a smile for only the moonlight to see.
⊡
Only when dawn breaks around the sky surrounding Sae’s bedroom does he realize his headache is gone.
Shidou’s humming as he smokes next to Sae, back to the headboard and free hand carding through Sae’s hair.
Face pressed against the pillow, Sae finds the dirty-blue of the sunrise through the glass, disconcertingly empty and almost serene because of it. Like a caricature of a sky. A painted diorama where the artist had forgotten how the clouds and the sun are meant to look, and had tried to compensate by layering enough blue to drown out a need for anything else.
"There’s no truth to tell you," says Sae, faint and calm under his breath. "About Rin. You already know."
Shidou’s fingers continue their rhythmic path up and down Sae’s hair. "Me knowing doesn’t matter until there’s something you want done about it, Sae-chan."
"What’s there to want done about it?"
"Oh, don’t give me that." Shidou’s laugh is soft and genuine. "You’ve been planning since before you even had me, weren’t you?"
Had me is such a strange choice of words. Sae mouths it to himself without voicing it out loud.
Then, for the first time in all the while he’s held the thought close, "I want to kill Prime Minister Buratsuta."
Shidou keeps humming, pausing only to take a drag from his cigarette. "Quickly?"
"No," says Sae. "I want him to suffer. I want to drag it out until he wishes for death."
Shidou exhales smoke. They both watch the tendrils wisp upwards to the ceiling, fading, eventually, inevitably, into nothing.
"Want to be there for it?"
Sae opens his eyes. He has never thought of any scenario that doesn’t end with him watching Buratsuta Hirotoshi die a slow, painful, gruesome death.
Shidou hears the answer.
"I’ll bring him to you, then," he says. Quiet now. Just as serene as that slightly wrong, ready-to-swallow-you blue. "Anything else, Master?"
The gentle emptiness of the aftermath doesn’t last as forever as it feels in the moment, but there is, at least, always a hazy hour or two where Sae doesn’t have to think.
"Yeah," he whispers. "I want breakfast."
For you, he means, because it’s Shidou who eats more, lives more, indulges more in what should be carnal pleasures for the human body, and lately it’s begun to feel like Sae is being taken through the motions of being human just to give Shidou the permission of continuing to want what he shouldn’t need.
But there’s a laugh, a kiss pressed to the crown of Sae’s head—
—and Sae knows, deep through sinew and bone, that Shidou hears the unspoken anyway.
"Your wish is my command, Sae-chan."
⊡
Year 2061, Month 09, Day 09
Location: 35.7294° N, 139.7182° E
Time: 18:16
The third of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 39 etudes is meant to be in allegro molto.
The irony of any angry piano piece is that the only way to play it well is to be steady down to the fingertips. The irony of this particular one is that it’s a study in quickness and anger, in true, mind-blanking frenzy, and the more Sae plays it, the better he knows it and the less he needs to be taught how to hold its anger inside him until it snaps.
It will never snap. It will always be over in mere minutes, even less when played at the speed it was meant to have, and it just leads Sae down the same loop. Play the piece. Have it end. Play it again to experience it. Do it better this time. Have it end even sooner, with even less of the spark it had when its anger was still foreign and novel.
There’s comfort, too, in that cycle. The same comfort Sae finds in the inevitability of data, in its inability to lie so long as Sae holds himself to the perfection it requires.
But anger, unlike most other emotions, molds faster. It loses its novelty and usefulness before all the adjacent pieces around it do: sadness, satisfaction, frustration, envy. Anger can’t last. It will rot eventually, and no one ever wants to watch decay happen in real time, least of all their own.
It’s almost sunset when the elevator pings open for Rin.
Sae pauses his playing, but only to reach for the half-empty wine glass next to the piano’s music stand.
"Rin-rin!" calls Shidou, cheerful. Sae can see his reflection in the polish of the piano, sprawled across the living room couch, hands under his head. "You’re early. What a shock."
"Cockroach," Rin mutters.
"Want anything to drink?"
"No."
"You sure?" says Shidou. "Dehydration ain’t good for you."
"Spare me," Rin returns, flatter than dead. Shidou’s ringing laugh is sincere. "What do you want? I have places to be."
Sae considers playing again. He glances down at the keys.
He catches sight of a shadow lingering from the dining area. A tilt of his head and he finds the hired housekeeper, a new face not much older than Sae, reflected on the piano’s open lid.
Without turning his back or looking away, Sae tells Rin, "Meguru tattled, I assume."
Rin’s sighs always come from so deep, as if coming from a 70-year-old veteran of five world-ending crises. "Only under duress."
"Impressive," says Sae, and means it a fragment of an ounce.
"And you don’t get to call him Meguru. You just met." Rin sounds stiff. Like he’s holding his body rigid. It gets worse when he repeats, "What do you want?"
Sae sips from his glass. The water is lukewarm. "He went digging where he wasn’t supposed to."
"So?"
"So," says Sae, "make sure he’s well-guarded over the next few months."
"It will be me-ssy," Shidou sings. "And you can’t afford to lose him again, can you? Freelance Netdancers always have it so rough without proper security insurance."
"Is that—" The disbelief in Rin’s voice sounds so young. It’s ridiculous every time. "Is that a threat?"
Sae rests a finger on the nearest F sharp with his free hand. He doesn’t press.
"Surely," he says, "even you must get bored of how unimaginative you are, Rin."
"I would never threaten Bachira Meguru," says Shidou, in a caricature of Rin’s seriousness. "You kidding? He seems like my idea of good company. So you better keep an eye on him until we get to meet—"
"Or what?" Rin cuts in, ever shameless about the pits he allows his logic to spiral down. "Or what, freak?"
Sae sighs, too.
All of Rin’s attempts to rationalize what he doesn’t understand only ever seem to backfire on him, yet he never stops doing it just the same, perpetually ignorant until he’s been fed enough answers and ended up spoiled from flavors he never would have thought of until it’s been whipped up into one dish in a buffet of hundreds for him.
Is he afraid, right now, that someone will take Bachira Meguru away from him and Isagi Yoichi again? That he won’t be able to do a thing this time, if it’s Sae or Shidou doing the taking? Or is he prepared to stand his ground no matter what, protective to ends that only seem like idealism after a point?
How childlike, too. How cliché. How utterly wrong to see on a creature meant to be obedient and unquestioning.
"Calm your tits, Junior." Shidou’s yawn creeps shamelessly into his voice. Sae hears him sit up, the leather of the couch moving under his weight. "We don’t have business with him. But Isagi was lucky that Papa Noa was there to clean up after him at Wilhelmshaven, or else a spree like that would have just ended up being more trouble than one test subject is wo—"
"Don’t finish that sentence," says Rin. Cold now. Freezing over so swiftly. "Him being in danger was more trouble than you were worth."
Shidou barks out a laugh.
Sae does, finally, press the piano key.
Then he holds out his empty wine glass in the air and begins to count down from five.
"You," he says. "If you catch this, I might let you live."
He releases the glass. The new housekeeper, creeping closer this whole time with gracelessness that Sae finds revolting, swoops forward from the dining room.
Out of reflex. Panic. Assurance. None of it matters.
The glass shatters on the floor.
Rin has yet to finish dragging out another exasperated sigh before a knife has buried itself clean and soundless into the housekeeper’s forehead.
He lets out a weak noise, eyes rolling to try and look upwards.
Sae turns away with an eyeroll of his own.
"Did you have to do that while I’m still here?" says Rin, annoyed. "Am I being framed for something?"
"I wish." Shidou’s voice comes from right above Sae, and he has only a second to react before Shidou has bent over to kiss him, hot and open-mouthed, and pulled away in the same motion. "I’m off, Sae-chan! See ya in a bit."
Rin makes a retching noise. "Did you have to do that while I’m still here?"
"Of course. You can even mention it in the alibi report," Shidou chirps, patting Rin on the shoulder on the way to the elevator. "Maybe if it leaks to the press, it will bury news results about you being an android, too."
Sae only glances over long enough to catch Shidou’s salute just as the elevator doors slide shut.
Rin’s hands twitch at his sides.
Sae crouches down next to the housekeeper.
Dabadie had hired him less than a month ago, had been shocked when Sae had no complaints.
Unfortunate.
After Sae had briefed him on everything, the first thing Shidou had to say had been, Well. It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? I mean, at this point—How can they fault us for being what they made us?
Such a neat conclusion only possible through a broken mind. Sae could have laughed.
More to the silence of the penthouse than to Sae, Rin says, "It was horrible. What they did to—to him."
Sae doesn’t react at all, refusing to be anything but occupied with checking a dead man’s pockets and limbs for any comms or recording devices. Each would have been deactivated the moment he stepped into the unit, but wading right into danger in the name of money or a radical cause makes people ingenious. Sae would know.
Once upon a time, after all, a thirteen-year-old Sae, genius and prodigy and whatever other label they had attached to how easily his expertise became capital overnight, had unlocked a way to tie human life to machine. He hadn’t found it. He had refused to say he found it. He had simply unlocked it, had isolated a link where others had looked past. For good reason, and for reason enough that Sae, ten and arrogantly certain his genius was protection, had refused to apply theory to reality. No matter that the newly elected Prime Minister of Japan insisted it would be a way to advance and innovate the nation’s tech industry future. No matter that Sae’s name would be in history books far before he ever assumed the role of CEO.
All it had taken for such carelessness to be oversight was a week away to Madrid a year later, lending his parents his Netdancing, an art then in its nascent stages, to oversee an Itoshi Industries project. A week away from Japan, not a single hour more, for them to come after his baby brother. All of nine by then and impressionable, a softening agent to Sae’s serrated edges. The younger brother that the same rotation of faces was relieved to find they could sincerely fawn over for being so cute and Rin-sama is growing up so fast and your eyes are so round, aren’t they, Rin-kun?
It hadn’t just been horrible, what they’d done to Rin. Sae had been ripped out of a Netdancing connection in the middle of a dial-in, all that data still flattening his brain as he tried to process what his mother was telling him. He’d forced himself not to look away from photos of the crime scene on the flight back. Later, he would even find it stupefying, how someone as stupid as Buratsuta Hirotoshi and his team could find it in his strategizing to greenlight the murder of a child who had never done anything but hold Sae’s hand and stick out his tongue at board members when told by Sae to, all to—what? Corner Sae into doing what he had already agreed not to and resurrecting an android in place of the brother who had nothing left of him except a brain backed up into code, untouched enough for Sae to use?
No, he’s never thought of any scenario that didn’t end with him watching Buratsuta Hirotoshi die a slow, painful, gruesome death. Worse than the one he gave Rin. Worse than the one he had given Sae by extension.
Even now, he still calls Madrid the dividing line. As if things could have been different if he and his parents just hadn’t left.
He knows it wouldn’t be. Not with the forces already at work then. Not with the people and organizations that continue to circle Itoshi Industries to this very day.
But it’s what contains the anger, and decay will not get him his revenge.
"To you," says Sae, quietly. "What they did to you."
He’s never asked if Rin has memories of it. It’s dangerous, to see a human brain as anything but data after the unthinkable has been done to it, and half by your own hands.
Once, that might have been one of the reasons Sae had found with a dead brother in one hand and a way, he thought, to undo it in the other. That resurrecting Rin will reveal who his killer was, nevermind all the complications this introduced, and the violence of asking a child growing into a body only meant to look like the one originally his if he remembered how he died.
What a joke.
Sae had found out the last ever time he went Netdancing anyway. Days before Rin even opened his eyes again.
By then, it was too late.
No way, after all, to un-know. Only an existence at that dead end, armed with a million things to not remember without ever forgetting.
"Was Buratsuta," says Rin, "also behind Shidou’s kidnapping?"
There’s no pulse in the housekeeper’s neck. A quick, clean death.
Sae straightens. "Yes."
"Why?"
"His team believes Itoshi Industries is getting too powerful," says Sae. "And that Mikage Reo was wrong for keeping a low profile on the Lethe trials."
"He was behind what happened to Meguru?"
Sae doesn’t know that for certain, though abetting is a crime worse, in their world, than murder.
His silence is all the answer Rin needs.
Sae props himself back against the piano bench. "Bachira Meguru was in my system the other day. That was a complication, and I don’t care enough to keep him out of the way of what happens next."
Rin scoffs. "We’ll manage," he says. "No matter what. Even if you’re also planning a coup d'état and he implicated himself in that."
"No," says Sae. "No coup d'état. Just Buratsuta’s head."
That, for whatever reason, makes Rin snort out a noise that sounds close to a laugh.
Surprised despite himself, Sae looks at Rin for the first time tonight—and maybe the first time in a long while, even as he’s trained himself over the years to see through his own brother each time he has to look at him at all. It’s the only way he can stomach, some days, the things he failed to do in succeeding what others couldn’t.
He looks the same as he always does these days. Better, even. More determined than agitated tonight, as if he’d just stormed his way through a dense crowd. Healthy. Alive.
So, so many years older than he would have stayed.
And one more today.
"Well," says Sae, flat. "Don’t let what will happen tonight get in the way of your birthday plans."
"I won’t." Rin’s eyes flick down to the housekeeper. No blood. No mess. Just a knife to the head and a dead body. Then he turns away, taking the dismissal like he’d delivered it himself. "This all I’m getting?"
"All you had to do was be here and witness what happened tonight. You have the truth. That’s all."
"Got it." Rin presses the elevator button. He doesn’t look at Sae. "Thanks. Or whatever. For looking out for Meguru."
"Your delusions do not interest me."
The elevator slides open. Rin steps inside.
He makes direct eye contact with Sae and, just before the doors close, sticks out his tongue.
"Says the idiot who remembered my birthday."
⊡
Year 2061, Month 09, Day 09
Location: 35.7294° N, 139.7182° E
Time: 20:03
Sae plays the sixth movement of Fauré’s requiem as he waits.
A religious afterlife, he’s sure, will be more than Buratsuta deserves. Sae has very little care for sending him off in any way that will feel like liberation. But even he has to admit that to limit a choir piece to a piano feels appropriate in its own way, no words to justify the fortissimo chords of God’s Day of Judgment and only a pair of hands to do what must be done with a requiem that Sae had once resented for its gentleness before he realized, in time, that death is quiet.
Death is a lullaby. Death is the severing of a soul from the body, whether or not that happens at the moment the body itself draws its final breath. Death is being lulled towards the extinction of the self, or of ego, or of presence inside your own mind. Death is quiet because no one ever sees it happen. Not the exact moment, not how suddenly empty a body can be when the consciousness inhabiting it leaves.
A plop into a body of water. A now useless pair of eyes trying to see a knife that has lodged itself inside the skull and brain. All in the tempo of a hymnal song not meant to disrupt. One moment mortal, the next trapped away into a paradise of peace.
Yet the world couldn’t even afford Sae and Rin deaths that anyone can hold a funeral for.
How can they ever fault us for being what they made us?
Sae plays. Not for himself, or Rin, or Buratsuta. He plays for Shidou and Shidou alone, allegro and fortissimo and molto, setting the world on fire across the city as a one-of-a-kind pyre for whatever body Sae chooses to throw into it.
A choir and orchestra, in the sixth movement of Fauré’s requiem, would be pleading in fear, pleading for mercy and freedom through baritone and brass. Under Sae’s hands, the piano yields no plea, nor mercy and freedom; it trembles and resists, lurches forward and swells.
Free me, Lord, from eternal death, the choir would be singing, on that terrible day when the heavens will move and the earth, when you come to judge the world with fire.
But what use is a requiem when you have done the impossible and played God?
What is there to fear about death when you have been pushed by grief and anger and betrayal to resurrect your own brother?
What death lies waiting when death has come and gone, and between you and the Grim Reaper stands a creature like Shidou Ryusei, monster and demon, protector and savior even when there’s no room in Sae’s world for anyone to be one?
Who else is there to sing this lullaby to? To lay this requiem for? To meet in the revelation only possible through worship?
Later, much, much later, it will be over, with nothing but a missing Prime Minister, a missing Councillor, and a different murder to function as alibi.
Later, heart jackrabbiting from adrenaline, Sae will shove Shidou to the ground, both of them slick all over with blood not theirs, so he can swallow kiss after kiss from his mouth, split open on Shidou’s lap and losing himself in the dizzying up-and-down of this irreplaceable high.
How can they ever fault us for being what they made us?
How dare such an insignificant man force the hand of Sae’s brilliance and call that a necessary sacrifice? How dare he profit off Sae’s own rise to power and call that too much when the time came that he no longer could?
How dare he give Sae the only gift he’s ever asked for and attempt to take it away?
Sae does laugh now. At last.
It doesn’t last long, buried under the banging of the keys as he reaches what would have been the final pleas of the movement.
Later, much, much later, Sae will feel alive for the first moment in this lifetime with Shidou’s hands around his waist. Those hands, those gentle, careful bloodied hands, the only hold in the world that can grip Sae without caging when it’s all said and done.
That, too, won’t last long.
But Sae knows death isn’t nearly final enough to last, either. For better or worse, its quiet, and the self, the life, will always ripple past that point if you let it.
How can they ever fault us for being what they made us?
Sae plays as he waits.